TOPIC:

Done a bit of dismantling...


Steering servo retainer:





Bumper is held in by 4 screws compressing rubber tube (completely rotten now) & two 2mm rollpins:






Wheels are 3 pieces screws together, no bearings on the front. LOL @ "Easy Sports"





Front spring guides have two circlip locating positions - this is 1/2 of what make the car have "adjustable suspension", according to the manual cover - bottom of the pin for offroad, up 10mm for on road






Front knuckles use regular metric fasteners with brass tubes:





Front arm pivot point, ditto:





Steering rod arrangement is "interesting"





Rear arms have a reversible stopper plate for on/off road "adjustability"




...

...

Underside of gearbox: gears & dogbones are spookily similar to XR311/Cheetah:





If only the rear cage on an SRB was this chunky...





Gear selector mechanism: same on other side (both need moving at once):





Inside:






Gear selections - low (I think?)




Medium:




High:




First major bit of wear/breakage I've spotted - this is where one of the three gearbox cover screws fit:



...

...

540 Motor looks proper old skool:





Gearbox spool (or is it technically a crown wheel?) & outdrives





MSC servo mount + solder splat:




Underside of MSC





Big pile of bits to de-smeg:

Funny that steering linkage, it's exactly what I was thinking about for my 25th project - it was a case of how can I link the knuckles together AND have room for some form of servo-saver AND have room to connect the servo to it? (Was gonna go bent wire, then decided it was so light I probably wouldn't need one).

Motor looks very similar to one I found attached to one of my Holiday buggies. If it IS the same, be prepared for it to be gutless

Nice project Jr Gee thats a nice pile of crud covered particles I'm already looking forward to your body restoration cheers Andy....

eddrick wrote:

...
Motor looks very similar to one I found attached to one of my Holiday buggies. If it IS the same, be prepared for it to be gutless

Car weighs 2kg, doesn't have a diff & has weeny 0.6 mod 35 year old plastic gears ... I think a "gutless" motor would be a Good Thing.

I gave the smaller bits a buzz in the ultrasonic tank yesterday, nothing overly surprising but the tyres do look very dry & floppy - they're now having a good long soak in gylcerine ... mmm, sugary

Thank JR, for the incredibly detailed breakdowns.

Just to add: I have a lot of old RC magazines, and I was looking through them tonight and can see ads in a couple of UK magazines for the Spital Trial 12. The magazines date from 1981/1982. Although of course, that doesn't guarantee the car was released at the time they were published, as many cars continue to be advertised for years after release.
If I find any earlier ads though, I'll let you know.

Regarding the first electric offroader - yeah, for some reason I had fixated on the Kyosho Eleck Peanuts as being it. But the honours would go to something else, as even the limited offroaders like the Tamiya Cheetah technically qualify as offroad.

H.




www.rctoymemories.com

Hibernaculum wrote:

Thank JR, for the incredibly detailed breakdowns.

Just to add: I have a lot of old RC magazines, and I was looking through them tonight and can see ads in a couple of UK magazines for the Spital Trial 12. The magazines date from 1981/1982. Although of course, that doesn't guarantee the car was released at the time they were published, as many cars continue to be advertised for years after release.
If I find any earlier ads though, I'll let you know.

Regarding the first electric offroader - yeah, for some reason I had fixated on the Kyosho Eleck Peanuts as being it. But the honours would go to something else, as even the limited offroaders like the Tamiya Cheetah technically qualify as offroad.

H.




www.rctoymemories.com

Sorry, had to laugh a bit at that - I poseted less than a 1/4 of the pics I took during dismantling ... although the were mainly to help me identify bits fo reassembly in however many weeks/months

1981/1982 is interesting - as it's well after the Tamiya Holiday Buggy and Sand Rover - and if you were after something like that, the Trial 12 is smaller, more toy like, and has (I'm pretty sure) inferior handling & ability)

I'd like to see some scans of the adverts, size & detail might give clues about the point in its life cycle the adverts were - and how in compares in price to other similar offerings of the period (e.g. large ad/high price = early in its life; small ad/low price = end of life?).

As a guide, I'd expect the price of a Sandrover in the same magazines to be around 50 GBP, with a "deal" (car + radio + Ni-Cd + slow charger) to be around 115 GBP).

Will get back to you with some scans soon. Unfortunately, had very little spare time over the weekend I was actually flipping through the magazines looking for something else, and was quite surprised to come across some small ads for this odd, rare car that we had just been discussing, in the process...